Hi, I'm Parth. 

Bookshelf: 

• Kay Redfield Jamison "An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness"

• Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo: "Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty" 

• Robert Gordon: "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" 

• M Nolan Gray: "Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It" 

• Amia Srinivasan, "The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century"

• Richard D. White, "Roosevelt the Reformer: Theodore Roosevelt as Civil Service Commissioner, 1889-1895" 

• Liu Cixin, "Three Body Problem" 

• Elena Ferrante, "My Brilliant Friend" 

• Sabyasachi Kar, "The Political Economy of India's Growth Episodes"

• John Sidel and Jaime Faustino, "Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines"

• Jen Pahlka, "Recoding America" 

• Lant Pritchett, Eric Werker, and Kunal Sen, "Deals and Development: The Political Dynamics of Growth Episodes" 

Articles and papers: 

• Saumitra Jha: "Is There an Economic Solution to Ethnic Violence?"

  • "port towns were five times less prone to Hindu-Muslim riots between 1850 and 1950, and half as prone between 1950 and 1995.. in Gujarat, port cities were 25 percent less likely than similar towns to experience ethnic rioting in 2002."

  • "any city or town — whether at a port or not — is more likely to enjoy inter-ethnic tolerance as long as the ethnic groups are part of an economy in which their business activities complement and support one another."

• Sam Asheworth Hayes: "Crime Reduction" 

  • "In 2019 - the final year of pre-pandemic data - there were just over 1.2 million violent crimes reported to law enforcement agencies in the USA. This included 16,425 murders, nearly 140,000 rapes, 268,000 robberies, and 821,000 aggravated assaults."

  • "rape accounts for a huge share of the cost of crime - 56% in the 2021 dataset - and also one of the highest ‘per crime’ costs."

• Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, "Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation"

  • "Misallocation arises because high productivity cities like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent restrictions to new housing supply, effectively limiting the number of workers who have access to such high productivity."

  • "Using a spatial equilibrium model and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find that these constraints lowered aggregate US growth by 36 percent from 1964 to 2009." 

Art, music, film:

• "Dear Alice' Decommodified Edition | Solarpunk anime ambience with no ads" and Andy Matuschaks reaction to it. 

  • There's value in having a positive vision of the future. It can provide a complementary, and potentially more sustainable, source of motivation for altruistic action. It can enable new forms of cooperation between individuals and groups. The process of creating a vision of the future can help us reveal our deepest areas of disagreement, and in turn work through them. 

• Vipul Rikhi: Ochintu Koi Mane Raste

  • There is so much beautiful modern Gujarati poetry and literature. 

• Taxonomy of musical traditions in Brazil. 

• Neha Basin, Lathe Di Chadar

Problems worth solving: 

• 26 million women globally experience perinatal mood disorders (PMADs) - mental health conditions that occur during pregnancy or the postpartum period. The symptoms of perinatal depression are consistent with those of major depressive disorder, including depressed mood; fatigue; feelings of guilt, inadequacy, helplessness, or hopelessness; and suicidal thoughts. Even in high-income countries, most women with PMADs do not get treatment. 

• Headaches affect almost three billion individuals annually: 1.89 billion with tension-type headache and 1.04 billion with migraine. In combination, the two disorders are the cause of more than two percent of all disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and accounted for 6.5 percent of all years lived with disability (YLDs).

• Freddie Mac has estimated that the US is short 3.8 million housing units to keep up with household formation. 

• South Asia experiences some of the world’s highest levels of population-weighted PM2.5 air pollution. Poor air quality contributes significantly to negative health outcomes for the more than 1.8 billion people in the region, representing >2% of the global burden of disease. 

• Less than 20% of Harvard’s 2020 graduating class worked in the combined categories of public service, nonprofits, arts, government, and research. More than all of those categories combined (23%) went into finance. 

• In a survey of the scientists who received Fast Grants for COVID, 78% said that they would change their research program “a lot” if their existing funding could be spent in an unconstrained fashion. 81% percent of those who responded said their research programs would become more ambitious if they had such flexible funding.

• Lead poisoning affects 815 million kids, causes over 1M deaths a year, and results in ~$1 trillion in economic losses to low and middle income countries. There are tractable solutions, like helping governments introduce and enforce regulations on products which currently have lead. The world did this for gasoline. Philanthropists and governments spend <$10M/year on this problem.  

• Around 45% of deaths among children under the age of 5 years are linked to undernutrition. These mostly occur in low- and middle-income countries. In 2018, stunting affected an estimated 21.9% or 149 million children under the age of 5 years, while wasting affected 7.3% or 49 million children under the age of 5 years. 

• The relationship between cross national differences in GDP per capita (GDPPC) and “human material wellbeing” is very strong, with a correlation of 0.9. The payoff from a “growth episode” can be very large. For example, India's growth acceleration beginning in 1993 and 2002 had a net present value of $3.6 trillion relative to the business as usual scenario. Any intervention that could increase the likelihood of growth accelerations in low-and-middle income countries would be extremely valuable.